OT: Non-Pioneer burner this time

riredale wrote on 1/20/2006, 9:50 PM

I feel kind of dirty, somehow, sort of like if you've been a Chevy man all your life and you just bought a Ford.

I've used Pioneer 104, 105, and 107 DVD burners over the past few years, and have burned over a thousand disks with them, always with good results on Ritek G05 blanks. When the 107 burner died a few weeks ago from a PC problem, I debated which burner to get to replace it. My first thought was to go with the Pioneer 110, but then I noticed Newegg had a special on the NEC 3550a. Various sites on the Internet spoke very highly of the drive, and I had just installed an NEC 8x burner in my laptop, so I made the switch.

The burner arrived today, and it seems to work well. One of the things I like about it is that it can burn CDs at 48x. Another feature is that it apparently does an excellent job with dual-layer DVD+R blanks and can burn them at a remarkable 8x speed. Finally, it works well with the latest version of the "Nero CD-DVD Speed" tool, which can do those P0/PI graphs.

So this will probably be a happy marriage, but I still feel kinda funny. Think I'll go take a bath.

Comments

gdstaples wrote on 1/20/2006, 9:57 PM

I purchased the same burner two weeks ago for the $49 minus $10 rebate thing. After owning four Sony's I am very happy with the NEC so far.

Duncan

TomG wrote on 1/21/2006, 5:36 AM

Riredale,

I'm in the same boat. I have been using Pioneer for 4 years and now building my first system. Just getting ready to order the burner and was opting for the Pioneer 110. But JohnnyRoy mentions that you have to get some DDLs from Sony to use it with DVDA and SoundForge. I sent a note to Sony a week ago and no reply. So I think I may opt for the NEC this time around. Does the NEC 3550a work OK with DVDA and SoundForge (without the extra DDLs)?

TomG

johnmeyer wrote on 1/21/2006, 8:38 AM

I can't speak for the Pioneer 110, but I have the 109 and it works great with DVDA. Haven't burned directly from SF for a long time, so I can't tell you anything there.

gdstaples wrote on 1/21/2006, 8:53 AM

No problem with DVDA - not sure about SF as I don't use it.

riredale wrote on 1/21/2006, 12:04 PM

TomG:

Don't know about DVD-A and the NEC 3550A. I burn with Nero Express v6.6.0.8, which seems to like the burner just fine.

Incidentally, it's fun to do one of those error graphs with Nero's "CD-DVD Speed" utility. I'm amazed that this DVD technology works at all, given the number of errors that happen during reading. I read somewhere that the error-correction technology within the DVD spec is actually more robust than the one used for data CDs.